Art and Science Transdisciplinary Lectures: Jennifer Wilson, Mathematician
2 West 13th Street at 5th Avenue
A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.
Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns. This implies that it is primarily concerned with visualizing, analyzing and predicting the phenomena we observe in the physical world and in the relationships we see among numbers. But mathematics also looks at the unpredictable, the unexpected. In this talk, Jennifer Wilson explores what it means to be truly random; how the probability of unlikely events changes depending on how the question is asked; and how stable patterns can become chaotic and then stable again as we change the way we look at them.
Jennifer Wilson’s lecture is paired with a presentation on September 11, 2010, of Change Encounters, a new project on probabilities, predictions and prophecies by Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellows Lin + Lam.
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Jennifer Wilson is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. She received her B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. Her primary research interests are in mathematics applied to the social sciences, particularly cooperative game theory and voting theory, and has she recently co-authored a series of papers analyzing the Democratic Party Presidential Primary. She is also interested in the role of visualization in mathematics, and is currently working on a collaborative project to examine how illustrations are used to convey financial information.
Posted on August 30, 2010
